1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic musical instrument, which allows playing musical tones of pitches including so-called microtones and a recoding medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic musical instruments have been developed, which allow performance of Western music with simple operation. In general, Western music is added with chord tones with specific functions and is given patterns of percussion tones when appropriate, as a melody tone conforming to temperaments progresses on the basis of the temperaments. For example, an automatic accompaniment permits a player to simply depress keys to designate automatic accompaniment patterns for producing musical tones composing desired chord names depending on the number of depressed keys, thereby obtaining accompaniment effects by a band and/or an orchestra. The chord names are decided based on the number of depressed keys, and the root tone of the chord is decided based on the lowest tone of the depressed keys.
Meanwhile, in areas other than Western Europe, for example, in the Middle East, India and Asia, music conforming to temperament types different from Western music has been performed and enjoyed since ancient times. In the music other than Western music, the melody progresses in conformity with the temperament types and is given appropriate percussion tones. But in the music conforming to the temperament types different from Western music, since pitches are different from temperaments, there is a problem that it is not easy to play such music with a keyboard instrument.
For example, JP Hei3-14357 and JP Hei3-14358 propose electronic musical instruments, which set a musical scale other than a temperament scale and switches from the temperament scale to the preset musical scale, in response to a player's switching manipulation, and create musical tones of pitches conforming to the switched musical scale.
However, a temperament type, a so-called “Maqam” in the Middle East contains plural temperaments, so-called “ajnas” (plural “jins”). The jins contains a microtone substantially equivalent to ¼ tone in addition to pitches conforming to the temperament. In some jins, a musical tone should produce a tone of a pitch substantially conforming to the temperament, but there is a case where in other jins, the musical tone of the same pitch expressed on the five line staff should produce a tone of a pitch different by about ¼ tone. Therefore, it is actually impossible for conventional electronic musical instruments to produce the microtone appropriately.